September 2011 Archives

It took me some time to search around for this so I thought I'd share it here with folks looking for the same thing. The video embedded below should start playing at 1:00:35, but if it doesn't just skip to there to see what Republicans have to see about U.S. immigration policy:

The overall agreement on focusing on border security first is just filled with lies and logical fallacies. It's a lie to say that communities along the border aren't safer than they've ever been, and it's a fallacy to believe that you can stop unauthorized migration across the border without fixing the broken immigration system. What's worse, people who have done the research on the border have shown that beefing up border security has probably done a lot more to keep unauthorized migrants in than to keep them out. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately in this case, politics has never been about truth, but about power.

NOTE: This post is a draft that I hope I will be able to make better through public discussion. I might significantly change it as I have more time to and get more input.

Pablo Paredes wrote me with some very thoughtful objections to some of what I wrote and has asked me to take the post down, for now, until I rework it. I'd like to honor that request. Apologies to those who have already read it and want the original text. If you ask for it in the comments I'll try to find a way to make that available once some things are made clear. In the meantime I'll leave up the text for what I meant by DREAM Statute.

Led by the newly formed National Immigrant Youth Alliance, undocumented youth have continued to step up their efforts at civil disobedience. I haven't been as directly involved as I would have liked but even from afar it's clear that it hasn't been easy. Still I can't help but feel that the recent civil disobedience in Charlotte, North Carolina, just took a different turn. Read Domenic Powell's post of the NC DREAM Team over at dreamactivist.org:

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department was forceful, frequently pushing people, including non-participants and reporters. They also arrested Mohammad Abdollahi, Isabel Castillo and Viridiana Martinez, undocumented activists from Michigan, Virginia and North Carolina, respectively. Along with them, the police also arrested two paramedics. Other activists were picked off from the crowd for unknown reasons.

Again, I can't say that I've followed or been present at every migrant youth civil disobedience but it's been my general impression that police are usually more deferential to migrant youth than was the case yesterday, in Charlotte, when it appears that they arrested people indiscriminately. This civil disobedience, of course, took place on the same day that the Democratic National Convention was announced to be a year away by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the chair of the DNC, and other local officials from Charlotte.

I'll leave you with Domenic Powell who speaks the truth with an unfettered tongue:

It's this sort of local organizing that easily makes California one of the most pro-migrant states in the Union, in addition to being the most populous one. This also brings to mind some of the great organizing going on in San Francisco with 67 Sueños, which I hope to write more about soon, primero Dios.

Separately these sorts of efforts might seem insignificant in the face of the massive deportation machine that the Obama administration has set up, but all together they are what make the migrant rights movement one of the most vibrant and active social movements in the U.S. today. There's something amazing about being able to go almost anywhere in the U.S. and find people in solidarity with the work I'm doing.